| Author/Contributor(s): | Maschik, Anna; Taylor, Imogen |
| Publisher: | Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster |
| Date: | 3/16/2027 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
At the house on Ostersteig, in a village on the North Sea, where the vegetables turn white with grief and the dead don’t leave so much as linger, girls are born to be farmer’s daughters until they become farmer’s wives. So it is a small rebellion when Great Grandmother Henrike secretly slaughters a sheep in the night, defying wartime rations. It is an act of love and survival, a way to feed her family—but also a portent.
From the family legend of this slaughter, Alma, Henrike’s great granddaughter and the last in the family line, weaves together lists, recipes, poems, superstitions, dreams, and secrets in the form of luminous, gem-like fragments to answer the questions she was never allowed to ask about the lives of all the women who came before her. Braiding the tender and the grotesque, the mundane and the otherworldly—a baby is born asleep and doesn’t wake for fifteen years, the well-meaning son of a furniture maker turns all of his worldly possessions to wood, a woman plants herself and grows into a lemon tree—Alma chronicles the scars left by a century of promised progress and spoiled harvests on her family.
A hypnotic mix of laconic wit with flickers of shimmering magic, Anna Maschik unspools a masterful work of formal innovation and emotional precision that asks what it means for a child to reckon with the forces of history—and for a young woman to inherit an ending.